This study examines the impact of gender neutralization on the anthropomorphism of speech signals and is motivated by the need to find a computer-generated voice for our android robot Andrea. A filter was used to gender-neutralize recordings from natural and synthetic voices, which were then pre-tested for gender neutrality. The results of the main experiment showed that gender-neutral voices were less anthropomorphic than gender-specific voices, with the naturalness of the voice having a greater impact than gender neutralization itself. Synthetic voices were rated less anthropomorphic than natural voices, and the additional effect of gender neutralization was stronger for natural voices. Overall, anthropomorphism ranked highest for natural gender-specific voices, followed by natural gender-neutralized voices, synthetic gender-specific, and, finally, synthetic gender-neutralized voices. Gender of the participants had no significant impact. These findings have implications for the development of humanoid and social as well as android robots.

Abstract Mobile devices enable users to consume media with audio content in a wide range of contexts, with environmental noise being present in many of these. Several methods exist that aim to improve the experience of mobile listening by utilising information about the environmental noise, such as volume and dynamic range adaptation. This paper explores a fundamentally different approach to improving the mobile listening experience by using the object-based audio paradigm, where individual audio sources are mixed in response to each specific listening context. Three experimental studies, containing both quantitative and qualitative aspects, are presented which investigate whether environmental noise influences preference of background-foreground audio object balance in a mix. The results indicate that environmental noise can influence the preferred audio mix and that the nature of the adaptations made is dependent upon both audio content and user. Additionally, qualitative analysis provides an understanding of the role of environmental noise on preferred audio mix. It is believed that the content adaptation method explored in this paper is a simple yet useful tool for adapting content to suit both the context and the user.

Object-based audio is an emerging representation for audio content, where content is represented in a reproduction-format-agnostic way and, thus, produced once for consumption on many different kinds of devices. This affords new opportunities for immersive, personalized, and interactive listening experiences. This paper introduces an end-to-end object-based spatial audio pipeline, from sound recording to listening. A high-level system architecture is proposed, which includes novel audio-visual interfaces to support object-based capture and listener-tracked rendering, and incorporates a proposed component for objectification, that is, recording content directly into an object-based form. Text-based and extensible metadata enable communication between the system components. An open architecture for object rendering is also proposed. The system's capabilities are evaluated in two parts. First, listener-tracked reproduction of metadata automatically estimated from two moving talkers is evaluated using an objective binaural localization model. Second, object-based scene capture with audio extracted using blind source separation (to remix between two talkers) and beamforming (to remix a recording of a jazz group) is evaluated with perceptually motivated objective and subjective experiments. These experiments demonstrate that the novel components of the system add capabilities beyond the state of the art. Finally, we discuss challenges and future perspectives for object-based audio workflows.

With the development of so-called next generation audio systems the question of evaluation of such immersive or object-based systems is of large interest for the industry. This paper presents the multiple stimulus ideal profile method for the practical assessment of next generation sound systems. The approach takes best practices from a number of different well-recognised methods as well as some novel ones from other industries. The paper presents the method as well as the initial results of the test using specially designed test items to investigate the characteristics of the method. Practical experiences in two labs with different listener groups and statistical analysis will be discussed in detail.

This paper reviews the current state of loudspeaker-based spatial sound reproduction methods from technical perspective as well as perceptual perspective. A nomenclature is developed that allows for a strict separation between these two perspectives. The physical fundamentals, practical realization, and results from perceptual studies are discussed for a number of well-established and emerging reproduction techniques. Further, the paper outlines novel approaches to spatial sound evaluation in terms of perceived quality and provides a comparison of current approaches.

We present our experiences of combining wave field synthesis audio with a projection-based multi-viewer stereo display. Wave field synthesis is able to simulate spatial sound sources of various kinds without the need for headphones or user tracking. Multi-viewer systems support multiple tracked users with individual perspectively correct stereoscopic images. The combination of both approaches allows the consistent display of virtual objects and spatial audio sources for multiple participants. First impressions with two application scenarios confirm that sound sources can be quite well located in space by each user. The system allows the creation of sound sources attached to virtual objects, which can be moved around in real-time without perceivable latency. In addition users appreciated the possibility of natural communication while they were exploring the audio-visual scenarios.

Wave field synthesis (WFS) enables the accurate reproduction of a sound field for a large listening area with correct characteristics for each listener position. An exact perspective on the synthesized wave field is provided for every listener. Therefore, WFS-technology is ideally suited to be combined with augmented reality systems, where every user perceives his own visual perspective of a given scene. This work presents a concept for authoring and user interaction for the production of wave field synthesis content in an augmented reality system. Also, the implementation of a prototype WFS-AR system based on ARToolkit is explained.